Over the years, computer programs have come to feature increasingly feature-rich user interfaces, and new generations of user input devices have been designed to facilitate human-computer interaction with these user interfaces. New user input devices are often released to the marketplace along with computer programs that are designed to take advantage of new input mechanisms available on such user input devices. For example, a new user input device may be released to work with a new game program for a game console. One problem facing software developers is that a new user input device may not be backward compatible with prior computer programs. As a result, users may be forced to change user input devices to interact with the prior computer programs. This can be inconvenient to the user, and may be a barrier to adoption of the new user input device.